Online Exogamy Reconsidered: Estimating the Internet’s ...

Online Exogamy Reconsidered: Estimating the Internet's Effects on Racial, Educational, Religious, Political and Age Assortative Mating

Reuben J. Thomas The University of New Mexico

reubenjthomas@unm.edu

March 8, 2019

DRAFT: Please ask the author for the most recent version before citing or sharing.

As the Internet's role in creating new couples continues to expand, now accounting for over a third of recently-formed U.S. couples, its impact on endogamy is increasingly consequential. While there are good reasons to expect greater diversity from online romantic sources, there are also good sociological reasons to predict greater assortativity online. Increases in the rates of interracial and interreligious couples within the U.S. have occurred seemingly in tandem with the rise of online dating, but the evidence connecting online romances and couple heterogeneity have been limited and mixed. Using a unique nationally-representative dataset collected in 2009 and 2017 on how U.S. couples met, and controlling for the diversity of their local geographies, I find that couples who met online are more likely to be interracial, interreligious, and of different college degree status, but also more similar in age. Couples who met online are not more nor less likely to cross political boundaries, however, and not more nor less likely to have educationally different mothers. These exogamy differences can vary by where on the Internet couples met. Population-level estimates suggest that only a small part of the recent changes in couple diversity can be directly attributed to couples meeting online, but there is the potential for more Internet-induced change if it continues to expand as the modal source of romance.

The potential for the Internet to change the structure of social relationships seems profound, yet the social impact of technological transformations can often be underwhelming, with stratification and social boundaries largely reproduced across technological epochs. A seemingly very straightforward and direct way that the Internet is altering social relationships is through

1

online dating, the creation of new couples from strangers who otherwise might never have had the opportunity to meet one another. Now that Internet sources account for over a fifth of new U.S. couples, and most new same sex couples (Rosenfeld and Thomas 2012), the structure of online romantic interactions is of growing importance in determining the kinds of couples and families that are formed within the U.S. If the Internet is bringing together people from different social groups and class positions, resulting in more families that blend together multiple groups, then those social boundaries could be substantially weakened in a world of increasing online dating. However, there are also reasons to expect that the ways people meet online may actually reinforce some group boundaries, creating more homogenous couples and families than would result otherwise.

What we know about the diversity of couples that result from meeting online has so far been very limited. National probability samples that include both data on how couples met and are recent enough to capture the rise of online dating have been rare: studies using one survey of the U.S. (Potarca 2017; Rosenfeld and Thomas 2012) and one of Germany (Potarca 2017) found mixed results on the impact of the Internet on couple assortativity. Both found that couples who met online had greater odds of being interreligious, but otherwise found that, controlling for other factors, online meetings differed only from specific offline settings that are exceptionally segregated on a social dimension: Potarca (2017, 295) found that online dating is related to less educational endogamy than are school-formed romances in both countries, and related to less racial endogamy than familial introductions in Germany. Using non-probability samples from opt-in online survey panels, Dutton et al. (2009) found that couples in Spain and the UK who met online were more dissimilar in age and education than those who met offline. None of these previous studies controlled for the diversity of the cities and neighborhoods the respondents were

2

embedded within, however, which is a potentially major confounding factor in determining couple composition.

Evidence from profiles and messaging within online dating websites has been more plentiful (Hitsch, Horta?su, and Ariely 2010; Huber and Malhrota 2017; Lewis 2016; Lin and Lundquist 2013; Robnett and Feliciano 2011; Skopek, Schulz, and Blossfeld 2011), but this kind of evidence only offers a limited window into an early phase of couple formation, within specific websites. While these have consistently shown that online interactions are segregated by most social dimensions, it is not clear that the extent is greater or less than what occurs in early-stage interactions in offline romantic markets. This evidence also doesn't connect online interaction patterns to the couples that result (one exception is Lee's [2015] study of an online dating website in South Korea, which found increased age and educational endogamy in the resulting marriages, but less occupational endogamy). Assortativity can change significantly between different online stages in relationship progression (Bruch, Feinberg, and Lee 2016), and it is reasonable to assume it likewise can change in the transition to offline stages. And while dating websites are the most common way couples meet online, a significant proportion of couples find each other through other online sources (Rosenfeld and Thomas 2012), which likely have very different interaction patterns within them. While studies that only look at online dating interactions do shed light on important early processes in couple formation, they can't really tell us about the Internet's effects on the endogamy of couples in a population.

This is the first nationally representative study of couples to demonstrate a general and robust effect of meeting online on the racial/ethnic, educational and age composition of the couples that result, compared to all other couples, as well as the first to control for the diversity of daters' local geography. I also offer here estimates of the population changes in exogamy from meeting

3

online, which has largely been a matter of speculation. I begin by discussing the core structural differences between online and offline sources of romance, and how these have different implications for different endogamy-producing mechanisms. I then discuss self-selection into online searches for romance and between different online venues, followed by a discussion of how user interfaces may affect endogamy. The analyses that follow will not test each of the potential endogamy mechanisms I discuss, but will show that in the aggregate couples who met online are more diverse by race/ethnicity, religion, and education than those who met offline, but more similar in age.

Expanded Opportunities for Romance Perhaps the clearest and most powerful effect of the Internet on romance formation is that it greatly expands opportunities for contact between potential partners in a society (Rosenfeld and Thomas 2012), substantially increasing the number of options for romance seekers, which likely increases the diversity of those options as well. While this may be the core difference between online and offline sources of romance, its impact on endogamy is not entirely straightforward. Similarity in pairings can be generated by different mechanisms, and these may yield different predicted changes in endogamy when opportunity structures grow larger. The key endogamy producing mechanisms I consider here are 1) structurally-induced homophily/endogamy (Blau 1977), in which social structures create similarity in pairings regardless of individual agency and preferences, 2) choice homophily/endogamy, in which similar pairings result directly from people's preferences for similarity (McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook 2001), and 3) mating market dynamics, in which competition for the most desirable partners can result in matches

4

between similars (Xie, Chang, and Zhou 2015).

Weakened Structurally-Induced Endogamy? The initial barrier to the creation of diverse couples in most societies is the lack of opportunities for contact between people from different groups. If the spaces, groups and networks through which people find their romantic partners are already highly segregated on a social dimension, then the resulting couples will also tend to be highly segregated on that dimension, regardless of other factors (Blau 1977; Feld 1982). Early-to-mid 20th century U.S. marriages typically occurred between those who lived within the same or nearby neighborhoods (Bossard 1932), and couple endogamy mirrored residential segregation. In the mid-to-late 20th century U.S., introductions through friends was the most common romantic source (Rosenfeld and Thomas 2012), creating couples that represented the homogeneity of friendship networks. The late 20th century rise in educational endogamy can be partly explained by the expansion of higher education, and an increased tendency to meet partners in educationally homogeneous settings (Blossfeld 2009; Mare 1991). Interactions online, on the other hand, can potentially occur between any two people who share a common language, and even at very long distances. Most Internet spaces for meeting new people are radically less exclusive than traditional sources of romance, expanding both the scope and the diversity of the pools of potential partners that people interact with. This increases the baseline probability of a diverse match for most social characteristics, in such a profound way that it might drown out any and all endogamyencouraging mechanisms online.

Larger dating pools can have greater structural differentiation within them, however, as subgroups and subnetworks tend to proliferate within social units as they grow in size (Mayhew

5

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download